Here’s A Video About The Making Of The ‘Jurassic Park’ Raptor Suits You Always Thought Were CGI

Hey, you know how the effects in Jurassic Park still hold up well next to CGI heavy movies that have come out 10 or 15 years later? Well, that’s partly because there actually wasn’t all that much CGI in the movie — a large portion of the movie was done using practical effects created by Stand Winston Studios. Dinosaur puppets and guys in dinosaur costumes basically.

Well, today those guys in dino costumes get their due. Hit the jump for a video detailing the development of Jurassic Park’s “raptor suit”…

Holy s–t. I don’t know about you, but the JP raptors just got 100% creepier now that I know there were dudes riding around inside them.

It’s kind of sad — Jurassic Park pushed these kinds of practical effects to new heights, and then killed them off all in one fell swoop. Too bad all the publicity surrounding Jurassic Park was about how “these dinosaurs were made with COMPUTERS!” If the practical effects were also given their due at the time, maybe they could have continued to develop and improve, rather than going the way of the dinosaur themselves.

Wait, what? I thought it was pretty much accepted that if not suits, at least most of the dinosaury stuff was done with animatronics and whatnot. Maybe I’m misremembering, but I thought 1994’s CGI was pretty much ass.

All the marketing for the movie was about its CGI. As a kid I thought everything was done with computers and for years wondered why almost no other CGI-heavy movies looked as good as the dinos in Jurassic Park. Until I watched this I still assumed most of the “raptors in the kitchen” scene was CGI.

Sooooooo…..how do I get my hands on one of these suits before halloween? There is that neighbor that has been letting his dog bark too long before letting it in the house; I think he might need a visit.